Petty leadership

President Obama’s gun-control agenda is calculated more to demonize his political foes and arouse his political base than to advance the cause of public safety.

Don’t get us wrong. We favor his proposals — while knowing almost for certain they’ll have at best a marginal impact on firearms violence.

But marginal’s better than nothing.

It may well be true, as the NRA complains, that Obama’s agenda — stricter background checks and limits on magazine capacity — will do more to inconvenience law-abiding gun owners than to deter the mentally unhinged and the criminal community.

But the Second Amendment does not state that public safety policies shall never inconvenience or annoy gun owners. The amendment — holy writ to the NRA — is at its essential core a public safety measure, even though in the Supreme Court’s judgment the amendment confers an individual right. Public safety is why the amendment’s wording is closely bound to the concept of a “well-ordered militia.”

Two issues Obama has all but ignored would have given significant advantage to his proclaimed cause of reducing firearms mayhem: 1. Mental-health reforms with stronger public safety components, and 2. Initiatives to tamp down violent imagery purveyed by a public-be-damned, money-grubbing entertainment industry via video games, movies and TV shows.

Yes, both entail serious constitutional pitfalls. But this exhorts caution on the issue, not avoidance of it.

Both areas, alas, discomfort signficant sectors of Obama’s political base. Mental health has become the politically correct preserve of sappy “progressive” sentimentality untethered from reality. And the entertainment industry is, of course, a vital funding and propaganda arm of the Obama political machine. (Here we’ll note, again, that the NRA ranks No. 50 on the list of biggest political contributors, according to the non-partisan Center for Responsive Government. Meanwhile, the Democratic ActBlue group, with deep-pockets in the entertainment industry among its benefactors, ranks Numero Uno.)

The American Academy of Pediatrics has pointed out copious research on the “desensitizing” effect of violent media imagery on children. So has the American Medical Association noted the mounting findings of studies linking entertainment violence to a violent culture.

Yet, Obama dispatched his politics Step ‘n’ Fetchit, VP Joe Biden, not to confer with such sources but to reassure representatives of the Hollywood limousine liberal community that their cornucopia of fabulous riches won’t be compromised in favor of public safety.

Unfortunately, this approach is consistent with Obama’s leadership style — which is, to divide the political world into friend and foe, villainize the latter and galvanize the former with demagogic appeals. All in pursuit of short-sighted, partisan goals. At this Obama has proved himself a genious.

This petty, often petulant approach has served Obama’s personal interests well. Trashing his opponent as a robber baron-era capitalist, he succeeded in winning reelection despite a dwindled vote for his own candidacy based on his own exceedingly meager record of actual, quantifiable accomplishment.

It’s therefore unlikely he’ll relinquish an approach that’s worked well enough for his own narrow political ends — even if the approach might, conceivably, undermine his legacy. He’s likely counting on — and maybe not entirely unrealistically — a favorable call by historians, who are, after all, mostly seated in Obama’s academic cheering section.